His country called

Jim Walsh's life changed when he left study of priesthood to fight in Korean War.

Jim Walsh's life changed when he left study of priesthood to fight in Korean War.

January 03, 2006|IDA CHIPMAN Tribune Correspondent

Jim "Red" Walsh, 19, was studying to be a Catholic priest. The second son in an immigrant Irish Catholic family, his parents were delighted. Jim went to seminaries in Chicago, Detroit and Dallas as the family moved wherever his father could find construction work during the aftermath of the Great Depression. He grew up a tough kid. Tall and lanky with bright red hair, he was in more fist fights than baseball games throughout the third grade His childhood was ordinary. He enjoyed sports, hanging out with other paperboys, and reading comic books. Although he had already opted for the priesthood, Jim's father maintained his son's "left jab, right cross, left hook and ring savvy" by encouraging boxing lessons from a former prize fighter. "I had every intention of entering the priesthood," he said. "But in June of 1950 when the U.S. Army's police action in the aid of South Korea's army erupted into a full-scale war with the North Korean People's Army, I wanted to do my patriotic duty for God, country and family." His mother, Teresa, didn't agree. His father, Denis, didn't either. "My father said that I was wrongly setting aside obedience to the archbishop on behalf of President Harry Truman's political prattle." As a third-year seminarian with "guilt-stained patriotism," he went back to school. In late November, the Chinese joined with the North Koreans, pushing back the U.S. Eighth Army and encircling the U.S. Marines and 7th Division troops. The U.S. Eighth Army had been driven back 275 miles south, the longest retreat in the annals of the U.S. military. Jim could stand it no longer. He left the seminary. His mother was crestfallen. "It's shameful throwing off black clerical garb for olive drab," she said. His father called him "daft." He asked why his boy would go from "a philosophical library to a bunker, from prayers in the seminary's chapel to shell-pocked ridges." "It's my duty," Jim said, "to my country. For God, I'll fight the spread of atheistic communism." On Feb. 6, 1951, he joined the Army and was sent to Camp Breckenridge, Ky. He was recommended for Leadership School, but declined the appointment and was immediately sent to Korea. Assigned to a front-line unit in the Eighth U.S. Army, United Nations Forces, Jim became a member of Dog Company of the 35th Regimental Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division. "We worked mostly with Charley Company," he said. At first, in combat, Jim was the ammo bearer. He would lug six cans, each weighing 20 pounds and holding 250 rounds, up a never-ending climb. In a 73-page epistle, written for his children and grandchildren, Jim is graphic about his experiences in Korea. There are stories about rats, cooties, death, destruction and what it was like to be a GI in a new kind of war --"rock to rock, ridge line to crest warfare. A new era of siege surge!" In the Library of Congress Veterans' History Project, "Voices of War," published in 2004 by the National Geographic Society, Jim wrote about his first glimpse of dead American soldiers. He said it took less than a year for the fingers that had once been folded in seminary chapel prayer to pull a trigger to kill communists. It was kill or be killed. "Transmission was done from seminarian to soldier, changing me from the godly to the deadly," he said. Discharged in November 1952, Jim was decorated with six ribbons, including a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. He enrolled in the University of Notre Dame on the GI Bill. Returning to boxing, he won the university's Bengal Bouts heavyweight division title in 1954. In that same year at a mixer, resplendent in his Bengal Bouts letter sweater, he met a Saint Mary's College sophomore named Jo Ann Myers, who he said "was the world's most beautiful woman." Jo Ann, born in Kewanna where her grandfather was the publisher and editor of the Kewanna Herald, was raised in Indianapolis. Jim and Jo Ann were married in Sacred Heart Cathedral in September 1955. After earning a bachelor's degree in January 1955 and master's degrees in 1956 and 1960, Jim served as a probation officer in Juvenile Court in South Bend for a year, and five years in the court system in Detroit. He then moved to Ohio for eight years, returning to South Bend to become the director of Catholic Social Services from 1963 to 1968. He spent nine years as director of the Juvenile Courts in Kansas City before going to law school at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and working as director of Missouri's Department of Social Services. After practicing law in Kansas for a number of years, the family -- now including five children -- moved to Culver in 1987. In semi-retirement, Jim was ombudsman for area nursing homes in five counties: Elkhart, Kosciusko, LaPorte, Marshall and St. Joseph. Still a member of the Indiana and Kansas Bar associations, he has turned his attention to writing and has written five books: two fictions on Irish history, two fictions on the Korean War and one factual story on nursing homes. In addition to the excerpts in the "Voices of War," three articles have been published in The Almanac for Farmers and City Folks. His stories are titled "A Lot of Bull," "Ringing Hogs" and "Peculiar Law."